Estimating the number of residents needed in community teaching hospitals

Hospitals are concerned with the performance of their graduate medical education programs because of increasing costs and reduced reimbursements, residency review committees' decisions about the number and size of programs, and pressures that derive from the increasing supply of physicians. In any effort by hospitals to evaluate the need for residency programs and the costs and benefits of having them, it is essential to forecast accurately the number of residents needed for specific activities. Refined methods to do this have not been developed. In this article, the author reports on an evaluation of a methodology developed by Chan and Bernstein to estimate the number of residents required and presents (a) the changes in the methodology that were necessary to estimate needs for both service care and assisting attending physicians with their private cases; (b) the data collection process; (c) some representative findings; (d) an evaluation of the method that employs as criteria the cost, the ease of use, understandability, communicability, and validity; and (e) the limitations found.